Family In The Bluest Eye

In the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Morrison begins the novel by illustrating what an ideal family looks like. The ideal family has a cute and pretty house with two happy and loving parents with a happy daughter who plays all day. As the novel progresses we learn that the Breedlove’s, a black family living in 1941, do not have the characteristics of an ideal family. The father is an abusive alcoholic, the mother is an optimist trying to keep her family together, and Pecola is a confused and self conscious little girl. In addition to them falling apart, they are also low on money. Toni Morrison conveys Pecola’s struggle with self-image and self-worth by showing how the world ruins children like Pecola and how it influences the way …show more content…
Society influences us in every way because, “Since humans are social creatures, we are wired to want other people to like us, respect us and look up to us” (Felix Langlet). There is no other way to put it, humans are the slaves of society. Morrison writes, “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs – all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured” (20). Since Pecola does not fit the standards of beauty that society invented, she feels ugly. This is unfair because she could not choose her eye color, skin color, or hair color. She hates being ugly because she thinks that no one will like her, respect her, or look up to her which exactly what a human wants. More beauty should not mean more happiness but sadly, it does. Unfortunately, the people we always hear about and see (famous people) happen to be better looking than others. Famous people are praised because they built a fanbase of people who praise them and people want that. If everyone was treated this way, the whole world would be happy. The book reads, “She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen” (122). When a person sees a beautiful white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, they want to be them because they want the same praise that they …show more content…
When one constantly looks for flaws, they will find them. The reason why your mind is your worst enemy is because people care about themselves the most and mostly care about their own flourishing. This leads to people trying so hard to improve their flaws that they end up seeing something they do not like every time they seem themself. Pecola thinks, “that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (46). Pecola needs to see that her eyes are beautiful the way they are and that she does not need to change them because she was meant to have them. Even though blue eyes would make her “more beautiful”, she was not meant to have them because if everyone had blue eyes, they would not be beautiful anymore. Once something becomes common, it loses value and importance. When one tries so hard to change himself, the change will eventually happen in their mind, which is the worst possible outcome. When someone wants something so badly, they will eventually get to a point where they lose all sanity and receive the change they dreamed of. Pecola was so sad to see that, “Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright… She spent her days, her tendrilm sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer